3 minute read
Our cars: Porsche Taycan
Infotainment (far left) was one blot on copybook. Car’s practicality and quality were both excellent
Porsche Taycan CT
Advertisement
FINALREPORT We loved our EV, and Porsche is already fixing the few issues we had
On the road Taycan prov
John McIlroy
John _ McIlroy@autovia.co.uk @johnmcilroy
ENGINEERS can be an annoying bunch. You spend six months with one of their creations, finally manage to come up with a couple of areas where there might be scope for improvement – and then you find that they ’ ve fixed them in general updates. Not even the decency to wait for a mid-life facelift. Pfft.
You can understand my frustration, because after half a year with a Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo, I am obliged to report that this £100,000-odd EV is every bit as accomplished as you might expect.
Its performance is staggering – and our car is a ‘ mere ’ 4S – yet its overall efficiency has been constantly north of 3mi/kWh. Its cabin has been comfortable, and stayed beautifully finished, with no obvious rattles or squeaks, and an admirable resistance to the sort of scuffs and stains inflicted by my nine-year-old son. My own grubby fingers did make a bit of a mess of the control screen on the centre console, mind.
On the road, the Taycan has felt perhaps a little wide and long for school rat runs, but its mix of sublime body control and a firm-yet-comfortable ride gave great confidence in most situations. It never felt like a compromised, jackedup version of the base model, although it was at its best as a long-distance cruiser. I particularly enjoyed a run to Folkestone; through roadworks, driving rain, heavy traffic and then empty motorway, it felt absolutely rock solid and supreme.
Even this round trip of well over 200 miles was completed with only a cursory glance at the range readout, too. Most recharging took place at home, where the car ’ s GPS-based locationspecific settings proved a handy way of only taking electricity during my Octopus tariff’ s off-peak hours. Few of my journeys required mid-trip recharges; on those that did, the Taycan would happily hook up with Gridserve and Instavolt points, gaining enough juice in half an hour to get me back to a cheaper plug.
If I am to nitpick – and let’ s be honest, we ’ re at that point in the conversation –the CT did let me down once. An electrical glitch after an overnight thunderstorm sent the onboard charger (an optional three-phase affair that most customers wouldn ’t bother with) into a right old hissy fit. The car refused to charge, and then also refused to select anything but neutral in its transmission – so it had to be pushed off my driveway and taken to the workshop on a low-loader.
It came back fixed, complete with a note politely pointing out that the offending piece of code in the software had since been amended.
If I had to name one area where I felt the Taycan was a little behind the curve, it was its infotainment. I’ m a dyed-in-thewool Android man, with Google stitched into every facet of my existence. So while the built-in navigation did seem to have a better handle on live traffic than many others I’ ve tried, it was always going to be one step behind my lifestyle in a way that Android Auto – conspicuously absent from our car – simply wouldn ’t be.
Sure enough, I ended up compiling 16GB of MP3 files onto a memory stick, and found myself cursing at the Apple CarPlay logo on the Taycan ’ s screen.
For a while it seemed that this was an open-and-shut case of Porsche being a bit too slow to the game. Even when an updated car was announced earlier this year, complete with a new infotainment set-up offering Android connectivity, there were no immediate prospects of these improvement being backdated to older models. Bang to rights, yes?
No. For as our Taycan returns to Porsche GB, there ’ s already a job sheet to treat it to the latest infotainment. It’ s a dealer-only fix, but one that introduces the prospect of further adjustments over the air. I shudder to think how those engineers will use this feature – and what minute gains they ’ll be able to achieve on such a complete package.
